Paul Buchheit: I’m suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low...

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that’s technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—they’re regular PCs and so they’re not always the most reliable.